Author: Raptor Mama

I bought a yard of this scrumptious halloween fabric a few weeks ago at Joannes with the intention of making a table runner.  It was like $10 a yard (on sale) so I didn’t want to pony up enough money to make a whole table cloth.

Well, I found a table cloth that I loved at Target (bonus, it can be washed!) so I scrapped the table runner idea and waited for inspiration to strike.  I wanted to make some kind of banner anyway (Kate loved the Valentines Day one so much we left it up until April) so I decided to use this fabric to make a penant one.

First I cut the fabric into 10 inch strips with the rotary cutter.  Then I played around with the angle of the flags until I liked the look of it.  I ended up making the cut at 4 inches (so 4 squares.)  Now I could go all high school pre-cal on you and try to figure out the angle… wait, no I can’t.  lol.  Basically, the flag is 8 inches across, 4 inches from each right angle.

Could I be making this any less clear?  lol.  Cut some triangles, mkay?

Then I cut some skull ribbon into strips and laid it all out on some bat ribbon.  First, I tried a zigzag stitch thinking it would help hold the lightweight fabric better, but it looked strange with the bat ribbon so I ripped it out and did a straight stitch.

I so love the way it turned out.  Now, I cut waaaaay too many triangles.  Any thoughts on what else I can do with them?

Still plugging along with this project.  I decided to order a bunch more paper in another line (It was October Afternoon!  I couldn’t help myself!) so I’m no longer trying to stretch this paper pack to the limit.  Yay for layering!  🙂

We had a busy day with lots of photos on the 5th, so I added an extra page.

It’s maybe 5×6 so you can see the bottom of day 6 peeking through underneath.  I love that about minibooks.  🙂

   

Day 6 was another big day- we went to the pumpkin patch!

I wanted to include a lot of pictures, so I resized some in turbocollage before I printed them.

And I added another smaller page.  You can see day 7 peaking out.

I usually do at at least 1 6×6 page for each day and then add in smaller pages as needed, but I went with a smaller main page for day 7.  I wanted to use 2 hipstamatic prints from my phone and I liked the way they looked on the smaller page.

Guest post today from Raptor Dad.

This year Kate is going to be Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, but neither Raptor Mama nor I wanted her playing to stereotypes. She’s getting a beautiful cape courtesy of her Mom, but I wanted to bring something a little different to her costume. Instead of going as the damsel in distress that must be saved by the woodcutter, Kate will be fully empowered to take on any and all hostile woodland creatures…even Mr. Big Bad himself.

Getting started: we got Kate a basket at Michael’s and defensive armament at Target. The basket is almost perfect, but the gun needs a lot of work.

Tools:
File (nail file, jeweler’s file, anything small)
Sandpaper (nothing too rough, 150 grit or higher)
Black spray paint
Acrylic paint based on the color scheme you want to achieve

The first step was removing the Nerf branding with file and sandpaper.

I added a few gouges and took off some bits to make the gun look weathered as well. Next spray paint the entire thing a base coat of black. I forget to snap a pick of this step, but it’s pretty self explanatory. Next using a deep umber and titanium white, I dry brushed the whole surface. This gives the gun a nice weathered look.

Next I used gold acrylic ink to add metallic detail to accents. I also used some varnish and sienna paint to make the handle a bit more wood like.

To finish it off, I used red paint to name the gun “Wolfsbane”, and added some black wolf heads, in the same way WWII fighter pilots would mark their kills on the side of their planes.

I added a few of the heads to the basket, just to keep the theme going!

It was a fun project that only took about three hours start to finish, and it adds a whole other layer of narrative to Kate’s costume. I couldn’t be much more pleased.

A friend of mine, who is a huge Longhorns fan, wanted some napkins to send to preschool with her twins.  I couldn’t find any longhorn flannel, but I think I came up with something cute that fits the theme.  🙂

They’re essentially the same as the wipes but then I stitched some white rickrack on half of them for added flair.

I’m really happy with how they turned out!

I’m having so much fun with this project!

Front page of day 2, Kate mailing her invitations.

Back page, cooking with Daddy.

Front page of day 3, Kate at gymnastics.

Back page, eating lunch.

Front page of day 4, playing in the backyard. This one’s on a transparency! 🙂

And the back page. Loving this!

We went on a field trip to the Recycling Center with our Adventure Friday group today!  Have I talked about our Adventure Friday group yet?  It’s so beyond awesome.  One fantastic mom puts together these awesome adventures for us every week.  🙂

This week we got to tour a local recycling center.  They showed us around and talked about all of the different things they could accept for recycling.  Did you know that the numbers on the bottoms of plastics referred to the number of times they had been recycled?  So 1?  First time it’s being recycled.  2?  Second time it’s being recycled.  Cool, huh!

I should mention that it was a wee bit hot outside.  And Kate was a bit over it by this point.  I thought it was super cool though!

It might be fair to say that the moms were more interested in this than the kids.  I will say though that Kate is much more interested in recycling at home since we went on this tour.

This seemed like such a good idea when I saw it on Pinterest.  Trust me, it’s not.  At least not if you have a 3 year old.

We started off strong.  I drew a circle on some paper, gave Kate a Q-tip and told her to go to town with the yellow paint.

She started with some nice, controlled dots.  I may have gotten a bit overconfident at this point.  Never a good sign.

Then Kate got impatient with small controlled dots.  She started ::gasp:: globbing paint.  It’s really not her fault.  After all, she and I do share 50% of out DNA.

Sadly, that didn’t stop me from getting frustrated with her.  ::sigh::  I wish that I had limitless patience.  In reality, we put the paint away for 5 minutes and started again when we were both in a calmer frame of mind.

Side note: apparently I suck at mixing paint.  When using crayola finger paints, yellow and red do not in fact make orange.  They make more red, regardless of how much yellow you add.  Truly, it defies logic.  She really wanted to do some blue. so I had her work on the sky.

And here’s our finished project!  Clearly I couldn’t find the brown paint.  What can I say, art is about the process!  Not the product!  🙂

2 of my scrapping buddies talked me into doing October Daily this year. Essentially, we’re doing a December Daily, but in October. Y’all, I was pretty resistant at first, but I *love* Halloween. LOVE it! The base of my album is the new Authentique line, Enchanted. I’m also going to be using scraps from previous years. It will be structured like my December Daily: 6×6 pages with one sheet (front and back) per day. On days that I have more to say, I’ll add in extra pages.

I still need to construct the covers (I’m thinking acrylic?) I’m a little behind since I was finally convinced to join this madness on October 1st. 🙂 I’ll likely have a few posts with my best pages unless there’s more interest in which case I’ll post more. Mom? Mimi? Bueller? (This is me soliciting comments in case you were confused. 😉 )

Without further ado, here’s page 1. It’s totally staged. Kate really does love this game, but she wasn’t in the mood to do it at the time I decided to do October Daily. Luckily she’s a huge ham so she agreed once I told her that I just wanted to take pictures. 🙂

I also made invitations for her playgroup Halloween party on the 1st so I included one on the back page.

I don’t even know who to credit with this idea.  I feel like I’ve seen this on a million Montessori blogs.  The basic idea is that you match up the written number with the number of small physical objects.  Clear as mud?  It’ll be clearer as we go through the tutorial.  🙂

   

It all started when I saw these decorative thingies in the dollar section at Target.  I had to have them!  (I haven’t mentioned yet that I’m having a Halloween themed play group party yet, have I?  Get excited.  🙂  )  And then I realized that they would be perfect for a Montessori counting activity that I had seen everywhere.  First I set out to create the numeral cards.  Pumpkins!

   

I found a free SVG file, but it had swirlies off to the sides.  No worries, I layered it up in SCAL and then cut it out in my cricut.  Awesome!

I cut off the swirlies and voila!  Ten pumpkins!  Now onto stamping.

   

I rarely stamp, but that hasn’t stopped me from procuring a large number of them.  🙂  I stamped the numbers 1-10 on the pumpkins.

Then I put the pumpkin cards along with 55 of the plastic pumpkins in this super cute pail that I also found in the dollar section.  Now onto the actual activity. 🙂

   

First I had Kate lay out the pumpkin cards.

   

Then she counted out the plastic pumpkins to correspond with the number cards.  So she set one plastic pumpkin under the pumpkin card with the number 1.  The pumpkin card with the number 2 on it had two plastic pumpkins set under it.    Continuing all the way to 10 plastic pumpkins.  Having exactly 55 plastic pumpkins in the pail helps her to check her work.  If she runs out of pumpkins or has pumpkins left over, she knows to go back and recount.

I made another similar set so that Kate and Emily could both play at the same time.  For these I started by cutting 10 2 inch squares.

   

Then I stamped a bat and the numbers on the cards.  I counted out 55 of the little plastic ghosts and put them into another pail with the bat cards.

I helped Emily lay out the cards in order.  She was concentrating very hard!

10 was a little more than Emily wanted to deal with so I ended up giving her 5 cards instead.

Kate and Emily loved this!  Kate’s had some experience with activities like this at school and she loved showing Emily how to do it.  They’ve played with these several more times already.  This was totally worth the effort.  🙂

I decided to move some stuff around in the living room and put all of my canvases on the same wall.  The plan is that eventually, there will be 9 canvases.  🙂